@@ Exorcism of the New York Times @@
Arash
October 20, 2005
The Exorcism of the New York Times
In the name of journalism, the paper must cast out the unclean spirits
http://img.slate.msn.com/media/1/123125/123019/2111919/2127379/051020_pb_JudithMILLERtn.jpg
Her ego was a weapon of self-destruction
By Jack Shafer
Slate.Pressbox[AT]gmail.com
The ongoing Judith Miller scandal—like Jayson Blair's journalistic malfeasance and
the embarrassments of the Wen Ho Lee episode before it—has sent the old gray palooka
down to the mat once again, where we find it wheezing, bleeding, and struggling to
find its feet.
The paper recovered from the earlier disasters because it published detailed accounts
showing readers where and how it went wrong. Those two exercises in self-criticism
aren't perfect, but if you want to know why Jayson Blair happened
(http://www.csudh.edu/dearhabermas/ethicsbk04.htm) or what caused the New York Times
to so grievously boot the Wen Ho Lee investigation
(http://www.modelminority.com/article7.html), they are the place to start.
But Judith Miller continues to haunt the New York Times two and a half years after
her Iraq work was widely discredited, because the paper has yet to document how she
helped botched the story of the decade and catalog the role she played in the current
White House imbroglio. Yes, the New York Times pointed to Miller's work in its May
26, 2004, mini culpa about its Iraq reportorial failings. And yes, the paper
effectively ended Miller's career as a serious journalist last Sunday by portraying
her as a newsroom loon and weapons-grade egomaniac. Assisting the paper in that
assessment was Miller herself, whose accompanying first-person account described how
she clawed her way into the Alexandria Detention Center and wimped her way out 85
days later.
The New York Times won't break free of Miller's malevolent spirit until the paper
commissions an exorcism in print, akin to the ones it conducted following the Blair
and Lee possessions. I've been calling for such an accounting since July 25, 2003
(http://www.slate.com/id/2086110), damning Judith Miller for her credulous and
slapdash weapons-of-mass-destruction reporting in the New York Times. I asked the New
York Times to revisit Miller's sources and methods to show how she and the paper had
been rolled by devious Iraqi defectors and administration sources.
Proof that Judith Miller never played solo on the Iraq topic for the New York Times
resides in at least four non-Miller stories
(http://www.slate.com/id/2128429/sidebar/2128486) published during in the war's
run-up that glower with skepticism about the administration's case and methods.
Likewise, in the post-invasion period, running right up to the date of the paper's
May 26, 2004, mini culpa, the New York Times published at least eight
(http://www.slate.com/id/2128429/sidebar/2128496) corrective pieces by reporters
Douglas Jehl, James Risen, and others about intelligence, weapons, and dubious
defectors. (All of these stories are cited in the New York Times mini culpa.)
What the paper never did—even in its mini culpa—was to account for how "Miss Run
Amok", Miller's pet name for herself, consistently snaked her bogus stories into the
Times before and after the invasion. The mini culpa never mentions Judith Miller or
any other reporters by name, the implication being that the failure wasn't just
individual but institutional, a notion I support.
The New York Times eventual knocked down Miller's Dec. 20, 2001, story "An Iraqi
Defector Tells of Work on at Least 20 Hidden Weapons Sites" with the July 9, 2004,
piece "Defectors' Reports on Iraq Arms Were Embellished, Exile Asserts"
(http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article6455.htm). But the defectors Abdel
Jabal Karim Ashur al-Bedani and the pseudonymous Ahmed al-Shemri, who deeply informed
such Miller pieces as "Defectors Bolster U.S. Case Against Iraq, Officials Say" (Jan.
24, 2003) and "U.S. Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts," (Sept 8, 2002,
co-authored by Michael R. Gordon) were never re-appraised by the Times.
Nor has the New York Times appeared to have ever re-investigated the sausage-works
that produced Miller's bizarrely sourced Dec. 3, 2002, story "C.I.A. Hunts Iraq Tie
to Soviet Smallpox" in which she advanced the idea that Iraq had worked with Russia
in weaponizing smallpox. As best as I can determine, the newspaper never
re-interrogated the famous Iraqi in a baseball cap who pointed at an alleged cache of
WMD precursor chemicals for Judith Miller and a squad of U.S. military WMD-hunters,
MET Alpha in her April 21, 2003, blockbuster "Illicit Arms Kept Till Eve of War, an
Iraqi Scientist Is Said to Assert." Nor have I found the Times article that revisits
the erroneous shocker Miller published on Nov. 12, 2002, "Iraq Said To Try To Buy
Antidote Against Nerve Gas"
(http://newsmine.org/archive/war-on-terror/iraq/pre-invasion/iraq-buys-nerve-antidote.txt).
Anonymously sourced to "senior Bush administration officials," the piece appears to
have been based on pure bunk.
The paper's earlier reluctance to thoroughly re-examine Miller's reporting could be a
function of internal Times politics. Bill Keller, as good a journalist as there is in
the business, became executive editor in July 2003 after a staff rebellion over the
Blair deceptions forced publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. to seek Howell Raines'
resignation. Keller, the theory goes, did not want to marginalize his predecessor's
favorites, of which Miller was one, as he restored New York Times morale. And he
didn't want to offend Joseph Lelyveld, who returned to the executive editor chair
briefly between Raines' department and his appointment. Later, when Keller published
the New York Times mini culpa, perhaps he thought that he'd done enough to purify the
temple. Many American newspapers wouldn't have done even that much.
By August 2004, when Judith Miller was subpoenaed by the grand jury investigating the
Valerie Plame leak and she chose to resist, it might have been legally imprudent for
the New York Times to re-excavate Miller's work. Publisher Sulzberger, who instructed
his editorial page editor to drape Miller's case in the First Amendment (resulting in
more than 15 editorials, according to the Times story), probably would have expressed
displeasure at his friend and personal martyr getting knocked in the pages of her own
paper.
Today, none of those rationales apply. The Sunday Times account about Judith Miller
read alone paints her as an insubordinate, self-serving, and undisciplined menace you
couldn't trust to assemble entertainment listings let alone file national-security
stories. Conceding in the New York Times piece that her WMD reporting was "totally
wrong," Miller proves she doesn't understand how journalism works when she says, "The
analysts, the experts and the journalists who covered them—we were all wrong. If your
sources are wrong, you are wrong. I did the best job that I could." That is a lie.
Reporters aren't conduits through which sources pour information into newspapers. And
sources aren't to blame if a reporter gets a story wrong. A real reporter tests his
sources' findings against other evidence in hopes of discovering the truth, something
Miller was apparently loath to do.
Judith Miller's ultramini culpa also slanders the fine reporters at the Knight Ridder
Washington Bureau, Walter Pincus and Dana Milbank at the Washington Post, Bob Drogin
and Maggie Farley at the Los Angeles Times, whom Michael Massing identified in the
New York Review of Books (http://www.why-war.com/news/2004/02/26/nowtheyt.html) last
year as journalists who didn't get the story wrong. You can add to that list the
writers of the aforementioned New York Times pieces from late 2002 and very early
2003.
Reading the New York Times Miller article along with the New York Observer's
excellent Miller feature, Christopher Dickey's backhanded defense of Miller in
Newsweek (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9742110/site/newsweek), and investigative
journalist (and former Miller colleague) Craig Pyes' anti-testimonial in Washington
Post reporter Howard Kurtz's piece, it's difficult to imagine many of Miller's
friends wanting to work with her again, let alone her enemies.
Asking the New York Times to exhume Judith Miller's work and revisit the methods and
practices that led to flawed WMD journalism at the paper isn't a veiled way of asking
that witches be arrested for burning at the stake. Journalistic standards were
betrayed at the New York Times. It was the New York Times, not me, that stated in its
May 26, 2004, mini culpa that "the story of Iraq's weapons, and of the pattern of
misinformation" is "unfinished business" and promised that the paper would "continue
aggressive reporting aimed at setting the record straight." Unless the paper wants to
hear Judith Miller's name yodeled with that of Walter Duranty on every occasion New
York Times haters assemble, one last public exorcism must be conducted to drive out
the demons forever.
* Jack Shafer is Slate's editor at large.
http://www.slate.com/id/2128429?nav=nw